Any
time Linux package management is discussed, the often overstated
horrors of "dependency hell" are a hotly debated topic. Any
time dependency hell is being debated, the resident Debian users will
invariably refer to Debian's own apt-getinstall
simplicity. "Why use an RPM-based distribution when Debian's
package management is so obviously superior?" the Debian
supporters will ask. "Why use Debian when the software is old
and out of date and you have to be a systems engineer just to install
it?" comes the reply. The discussion generally deteriorates from
there into the all-too-familiar "mine is bigger" vein that,
well, all such discussions tend to deteriorate into.

With
Psyche, your options are a bit more open than in previous versions of
Red Hat Linux, where package management after the install was sorely
lacking. For the first time, Red Hat has included a GUI package
manager (separate from Red Hat Network) capable of adding and
removing packages intelligently from the installation CDs. You can
start it by opening up a command box and running
redhat-config-packages or by pointing to Start Here ->
System Settings -> Packages. For working with the packages on
the official Red Hat CDs, this is a convenient and powerful tool.
Once you step outside the box and start adding third-party packages,
things get a bit more complicated. Thankfully, the folks at FreshRPMS
have given us another option in the war against dependency hell: a
full Red Hat 8.0 apt repository, including some very interesting
custom packages created by FreshRPMS.

Setting
Psyche up to work with apt and the FreshRPMS repository is simplicity
itself. First, visit this
page and
click on the link for Red Hat 8.0. Grab the apt and apt-devel
packages (you don't need the source [.src.rpm] rpm) and save them to
your machine. Then open a terminal, switch to root user, and install
the packages with:

It
should go without saying that this requires an active Internet
connection. After issuing this command you should see a variety of
messages scrolling past as apt connects to the FreshRPMS servers,
logs in, and takes a look around. Once you're returned to the command
prompt, assuming there were no errors, the full power of apt is at
your disposal. (Be sure to type man apt or enter #aptinto a command box or Konqueror's address bar to learn more about
this powerful tool.)

First,
let's make sure our Psyche installation is correctly set up to use
apt. That is, we'll ask apt to make sure there are no broken
dependencies or duplications in the RPM database that will keep apt
from working.

apt-get
-f install (think of the -f as fix)

As
you might have guessed, this tells apt to verify your RPM database.
It should do a bit of checking and exit with something similar to:

Reading
Package Lists... Done

Building
Dependency Tree... Done

0
packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 removed and 3 not upgraded.

If
not, inspect the errors carefully and be very sure you know
what you're doing before allowing apt to make any changes to your
system. Since both of my installs thus far haven't produced any
errors at this stage, I'm going to assume your installation was
equally flawless.